Monday, March 09, 2015

The College Rape Overcorrection

The issue of sexual assault on college campuses is one I care a lot about – and not just because my oldest daughter just started college this year and two more will be doing so in the next 2½ and 5½ years. I continue to view this as a very serious problem, but as I've done more reading on this (especially the article below), I don't think it's as widespread as some advocates have claimed (e.g., 20-25% of all women get raped in college). I also have a greater appreciation for how impossibly difficult many of these cases are, and how guys can get completely railroaded. It's very disturbing to me that three very high profile recent cases of women students claiming they've been raped have turned out to be full of holes: a) The Rolling Stone UVA story; b) the cover story in the NYT Magazine two weeks ago, The Stanford Undergraduate and the Mentor; and c) the story in The Daily Beast that calls into serious question the credibility of Emma Sulkowicz, the Columbia student famous for carrying her mattress on campus as a symbol of her burden as a victim and a protest against Columbia's failure to expel the man she calls her rapist.

If this issue is of interest to you, I highly recommend this article by Emily Yoffe in Slate (which I missed when it first came out on Dec. 7th):

The College Rape Overcorrection

Sexual assault on campus is a serious problem. But efforts to protect women from a putative epidemic of violence have led to misguided policies that infringe on the civil rights of men.

… One campus rape is one too many. But the severe new policies championed by the White House, the Department of Education, and members of Congress are responding to the idea that colleges are in the grips of an epidemic—and the studies suggesting this epidemic don't hold up to scrutiny. Bad policy is being made on the back of problematic research, and will continue to be unless we bring some healthy skepticism to the hard work of putting a number on the prevalence of campus rape.

… Government officials and campus administrators are paying more attention to what's going on between the sheets in dorm rooms than ever before. Despite all their newfound efforts to curtail sexual violence on campus, however, they're willfully ignoring the most important single factor running through accounts of such violence: alcohol.

…It is simply misleading to tell young women they have as great a chance of being sexually assaulted while in their dorm studying at 1 p.m. as they do at a drunken frat party at 1 a.m. There are patterns to victimization. The Campus Sexual Assault Study found the majority of victims were freshmen and sophomores, the most common time of year to be assaulted is when school begins in the fall, the most common days were Friday and Saturday, the most common time was after midnight. People who had been previously assaulted were at far greater risk of revictimization. Alcohol was overwhelmingly an element. The United Educators study of insurance payouts for sexual assault found that "Alcohol was a significant factor in nearly all of the claims studied."

And it's not just about conveying to young women the dangers of drinking. It's equally important to tell young men about the jeopardy they face when having an alcohol-fueled sexual encounter at college.

The College Rape Overcorrection

Sexual assault on campus is a serious problem. But efforts to protect women from a putative epidemic of violence have led to misguided policies that infringe on the civil rights of men.